Western Allied invasion of Germany

• 1. Introduction

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  The Western Allied invasion of Germany reached its decisive turning point on the 22nd of March 1945, when American troops crossed the Rhine under a bright moon with almost no resistance at Nierstein. Seven startled German soldiers surrendered on the spot, then paddled themselves unescorted back across the river to be placed in custody. What those soldiers did not yet know was that the German army capable of stopping the Allies no longer existed. The questions that follow are larger than any single river crossing: How did a military alliance of nearly ninety divisions coordinate its final campaign across hundreds of miles? Why did the Western Allies choose Leipzig over Berlin? And how did a war that had seemed so hard for so long end so suddenly?

• 2. A Broken Defense

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  Hitler's gamble in the Ardennes cost Germany the reserves it needed to defend the Rhine. By January 1945, Allied forces had pushed German troops back to the very starting points of the Battle of the Bulge, erasing every gain the offensive had achieved. The failure left the Wehrmacht's strategic reserve exhausted. Additional losses in the Rhineland stripped away more formations, so that by the time Allied forces approached the river, only shattered remnants of units remained to hold the east bank.

  On the 7th of March, American forces seized the bridge at Remagen intact, a stroke of luck that gave the Allies a large bridgehead without a fight. During the preceding weeks, German casualties from February through March 1945 were estimated at 400,000 men, including 280,000 taken prisoner. Facing the Allies was Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring, who had taken command on the 10th of March from Gerd von Rundstedt. Kesselring had an outstanding record as a defensive strategist from the Italian campaign, but he had inherited an army reduced to only 26 divisions on the entire Western Front. Against nearly ninety Allied divisions, the arithmetic of the situation left little room for hope.

  On the Eastern Front, the Soviet Red Army had already taken most of Poland, pushed into East Prussia, and by March stood within striking distance of Berlin. The rapid Soviet advances destroyed additional veteran German combat units and limited Hitler's ability to send reinforcements west. The Germans had an estimated 214 divisions on the Eastern Front in April, meaning nearly everything was committed there, leaving Kesselring's command to face the Allied crossing with almost nothing in reserve.

• 3. The Rhine Crossings

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  Patton moved first, driven partly by rivalry. On the 21st of March he ordered his XII Corps to prepare for a crossing one day before Montgomery's scheduled assault, working from supplies that had been stockpiled since autumn in depots in Lorraine. To avoid the obvious crossing point at Mainz, he feinted there while sending his real assault force to Nierstein and Oppenheim, 9-10 miles south of the city. At Nierstein on the night of the 22nd, assault troops met no resistance at all. At Oppenheim, the first wave was halfway across when German machine-gun fire opened up. An intense exchange lasting about thirty minutes followed, with boats continuing to push across even under fire. The Germans surrendered by midnight. By the afternoon of the 23rd, all three regiments of the 5th Infantry Division were across and a Treadway bridge was open to traffic.

  Montgomery's Operation Plunder launched on the evening of the 23rd with a scope comparable to the Normandy invasion: more than 1,250,000 men, thirty full-strength divisions, and some 11,000 air sorties in the three days preceding the assault. The 1st Commando Brigade crossed north of Wesel under cover of darkness and waited within a mile of the city while RAF Bomber Command dropped one thousand tons of bombs on it. Commandos secured Wesel late on the morning of the 24th. The American 30th Infantry Division, crossing farther south after an artillery preparation that Eisenhower himself observed from the front, found the east bank almost undefended. The artillery had been so perfectly timed that assault battalions simply motored across and claimed the bank against almost no resistance.

  Eight miles south of Boppard, on the 26th of March, elements of the 89th Infantry Division crossed through the Rhine Gorge, where canyon walls rose more than 300 feet on both sides and the river ran with unpredictable currents. Despite terrain that compounded every difficulty, VIII Corps troops secured the heights by dark on the 26th.

• 4. Encircling the Ruhr

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  Eisenhower's most consequential operational decision was the encirclement of the Ruhr industrial complex. The 2nd Armored Division broke out on the night of the 29th of March from a forward position near Haltern and made an uninterrupted 40-mile drive east to Beckum, cutting two of the Ruhr's three remaining rail lines and severing the autobahn to Berlin. To the south, the 1st Army struck eastward from its Remagen bridgehead, heading for Giessen and the Lahn River 65 miles away, before turning north toward Paderborn.

  The final link-up came early in the afternoon of the 1st of April, when elements of the 2nd and 3rd Armored Divisions met at Lippstadt, sealing Field Marshal Walter Model's Army Group B inside American lines. Model had positioned his troops along the Sieg River south of Cologne, expecting an attack directly northward; the Americans drove east instead and encircled him entirely.

  The reduction of the pocket proceeded steadily through April. A task force driving for Paderborn on the 29th of March ran into students from an SS panzer replacement training center equipped with about 60 tanks; fanatical resistance stalled American armor for an entire day. By contrast, when the pocket formally collapsed between the 16th and the 18th of April, German troops surrendered by the tens of thousands. The final prisoner count from the Ruhr reached 325,000, far beyond anything the Americans had anticipated. Tactical commanders enclosed open fields with barbed wire to create makeshift camps. Army Group B commander Model committed suicide on the 21st of April.

• 5. The Decision Not to Take Berlin

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  Soviet forces held a bridgehead over the Oder River just 30 miles from Berlin while the nearest Allied armies on the Rhine were more than 300 miles away, with the Elbe still 200 miles ahead. Eisenhower concluded that the Soviets would capture Berlin long before any Western force could reach it. Rather than race for a city already assigned to the Soviet occupation zone at the Yalta Conference, he turned his attention to cutting the German army in two by meeting the Soviets at Leipzig.

  The British Prime Minister and Chiefs of Staff strongly objected. Even Patton later agreed with Churchill that Montgomery's forces could have reached Berlin within three days. Eisenhower, backed by the American Chiefs of Staff, held firm: his overriding objective was the swiftest military victory possible. Bradley had warned that fighting for a city already promised to the Soviets at Yalta could cost 100,000 casualties. By the 15th of April, Eisenhower ordered all armies to halt at the Elbe and Mulde rivers.

  By the evening of the 11th of April, the 9th Army's 2nd Armored Division had dashed 73 miles to reach the Elbe southeast of Magdeburg, just 50 miles from Berlin. Elements crossed to the opposite bank and waited, hoping for permission to push on. On the 15th of April, they received their answer: Eisenhower sent Bradley his final word that the 9th Army was to stay put. The rumored National Redoubt in the Alps, where fanatically loyal troops were said to be preparing a last stand, had also pulled Allied attention south. In reality, the Nazi leadership had never seriously planned any such redoubt; the concept had been allowed to evolve as a ruse of war designed to misdirect Allied resources.

• 6. South to Austria

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  While the 12th Army Group pressed east, the 6th U.S. Army Group swept south through Bavaria and the Black Forest. The 7th Army's XV Corps fought for six days before taking Aschaffenburg, 35 miles east of the Rhine, on the 3rd of April. At Heilbronn, 40 miles into the German rear, the VI Corps met unexpectedly fierce resistance that took nine days of intense fighting to overcome. Nuremberg, reached on the 16th of April, presented the same kind of anti-aircraft gun defense that the 1st Army faced at Leipzig; only after breaching that ring and fighting house-to-house did the 7th Army take the city on the 20th.

  On the 4th of April, near the town of Merkers, elements of the 90th Infantry Division found a sealed salt mine holding a large portion of the German national treasure: vast quantities of paper currency, priceless paintings, looted gold and silver jewelry, and an estimated 250,000,000 dollars worth of gold bars and coins. That same day, the 4th Armored Division and elements of the 89th Infantry Division captured the small town of Ohrdruf, a few miles south of Gotha, and found the first concentration camp taken by the Western Allies.

  On the 30th of April, elements of the 7th Army's XV and XXI Corps captured Munich, 30 miles south of the Danube. Four days later, on the 4th of May, the VI Corps met elements of Lieutenant General Lucian Truscott's U.S. 5th Army on the Italian frontier, linking the European and Mediterranean theaters. On the same day, the XV Corps captured Berchtesgaden, the town that would have been Hitler's command post in the National Redoubt that never was.

• 7. Elbe Day and Surrender

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  At 11:30 on the 25th of April 1945, a small patrol from the 69th Infantry Division met a lone Soviet horseman in the village of Leckwitz. Several other patrols had similar encounters later that day. The following morning, division commander Major General Emil F. Reinhardt met Major General Vladimir Rusakov of the Soviet 58th Guards Rifle Division at Torgau in the first official link-up ceremony. That date, the 25th of April, is known as Elbe Day, the moment when Germany was effectively cut in two.

  In the north, British forces captured Bremen on the 26th of April and crossed the Elbe on the 29th. By the 2nd of May, Lubeck and Wismar, 40-50 miles beyond the Elbe, were in Allied hands, sealing off the Germans remaining in the Jutland Peninsula. Hamburg, the last major pocket of resistance in the north, fell on the 3rd of May. On the 6th of May, the Polish 1st Armoured Division seized the Kriegsmarine naval base at Wilhelmshaven, where General Maczek accepted the capitulation of the East Frisian Fleet and more than ten infantry divisions.

  Hitler committed suicide on the 30th of April, leaving Grand Admiral Karl Donitz to negotiate surrender terms. After Donitz attempted to surrender only to the Western Allies, a proposal rejected on the 7th of May, his representative Alfred Jodl signed documents for a complete surrender on all fronts. The surrender became effective on the 8th of May 1945. German President Richard von Weizsacker described the invasion as a liberation in 1985, and Chancellor Angela Merkel used the same word in 2019.